George A. Stewart - Earth Abides

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EARTH ABIDES

George R. Stewart

FAWCETT CREST · NEW YORK

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book

is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or

destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received

payment for it.

A Fawcett Crest Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division

of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random

House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or

by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publisher.

Except for an occasional reference which some of my friends may recognize,

the people and incidents and consequences of *Earth Abides* derive from the

imagination and are not to be identified with any living or dead person or

any actual occurrence.

ISBN 0-449-21301-3

This edition published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company

Printed in Canada

First Fawcett Crest Edition: April 1971

First Ballantine Books Edition: May 1983

40 39 38 17 36

------------------------------------------------------------------------

to Jill

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Men go and come, but earth abides

ECCLESIASTES, I, 4

*Contents*

1 World Without End 1

2 The Year 22 145

3 The Last American 307

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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*1*

*World Without End*

If a killing type of virus strain should suddenly arise by mutation ... it

could, because of the rapid transportation in which we indulge nowadays, be

carried to the far corners of the earth and cause the deaths of millions of

people.

-- W. M. Stanley, in *Chemical and Engineering News,* Dec. 22, 1947.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Chapter 1*

*... and the government of the United States of America is herewith

suspended, except in the District of Columbia, as of the emergency. Federal

officers, including those of the Armed Forces, will put themselves under

the orders of the governors of the various states or of any other

functioning local authority.* By order of the Acting President. *God save

the people of the United States....*

*Here is an announcement which has just come in from the Bay Area Emergency

Council. The West Oakland Hospitalization Center has been abandoned. Its

functions, including burials at sea, are now concentrated at the Berkeley

Center. That is all....*

*Keep tuned to this Station, which is the only one now in operation in

northern California. We shall inform you of developments, as long as it is

possible.*

Just as he pulled himself up to the rock-ledge, he heard a sudden rattle,

and felt a prick of fangs. Automatically he jerked back his right hand;

turning his head, he saw the snake, coiled and menacing. It was not a large

one, he noted, even at the moment when he raised his hand to his lips and

sucked hard at the base of the index-finger, where a little drop of blood

was oozing out.

*"Don't waste time by killing the snake!"* he remembered.

He slid down from the ledge, still sucking. At the bottom he saw the hammer

lying where he had left it. For a moment he thought he would go on and

leave it there. That seemed like panic; so he stooped and picked it up with

his left hand, and went on down the rough trail.

He did not hurry. He knew better than that. Hurry only speeded up a man's

heart, and made the venom circulate faster. Yet his heart was pounding so

rapidly from excitement or fear that hurrying or not hurrying, it seemed,

should make no difference. After he had come to some trees, he took his

handkerchief and bound it around his right wrist. With the aid of a twig he

twisted the handkerchief into a crude tourniquet.

Walking on, he felt himself recovering from his panic. His heart was

slowing down. As he considered the situation, he was not greatly afraid. He

was a young man, vigorous and healthy. Such a bite would hardly be fatal,

even though he was by himself and without good means of treatment.

Now he saw the cabin ahead of him. His hand felt stiff. Just before he got

to the cabin, he stopped and loosened the tourniquet, as he had read should

be done, and let the blood circulate in the hand. Then he tightened it

again.

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He pushed open the door, dropping the hammer on the floor as he did so. It

fell, handle up, on its heavy head, rocked back and forth for a moment, and

then stood still, handle in the air.

He looked into the drawer of the table, and found his snake-bite outfit,

which he should have been carrying with him on this day of a days. Quickly

he followed the directions, slicing with the razor-blade a neat little

criss-cross over the mark of the fangs, applying the rubber suction-pump.

Then he lay on his bunk watching the rubber bulb slowly expand, as it

sucked the blood out.

He felt no premonitions of death. Rather, the whole matter still seemed to

him just a nuisance. People had kept telling him that he should not go into

the mountains by himself--"Without even a dog!" they used to add. He had

always laughed at them. A dog was constant trouble, getting mixed up with

porcupines or skunks, and he was not fond of dogs anyway. Now all those

people would say, "Well, we warned you!"

Tossing about half-feverishly, he now seemed to himself to be composing a

defense. "Perhaps," he would say, "the very danger in it appealed to me!"

(That had a touch of the heroic in it.) More truthfully he might say, "I

like to be alone at times, really need to escape from all the problems of

dealing with people." His best defense, however, would merely be that, at

least during the last year, he had gone into the mountains alone as a

matter of business. As a graduate student, he was working on a thesis: *The

Ecology of the Black Creek Area.* He had to investigate the relationships,

past and present, of men and plants and animals in this region. Obviously

he could not wait until just the right companion came along. In any case,

he could never see that there was any great danger. Although nobody lived

within five miles of his cabin, during the summer hardly a day passed

without some fisherman coming by, driving his car up the rocky road or

merely following the stream.

Yet, come to think of it, when had he last seen a fisherman? Not in the

past week certainly. He could not actually remember whether he had seen one

in the two weeks that he had been living by himself in the cabin. There was

that car he had heard go by after dark one night. He thought it strange

that any car would be going up that road in the darkness, and could hardly

see the necessity, for ordinarily people camped down below for the night

and went up in the morning. But perhaps, he thought, they wanted to get up

to their favorite stream, to go out for some early fishing.

No, actually, he had not exchanged a word with anyone in the last two

weeks, and he could not even remember that he had seen anyone.

A throb of pain brought him back to what was happening at the moment. The

hand was beginning to swell. He loosened the tourniquet to let the blood

circulate again.

Yes, as, he returned to his thoughts, he realized that he was out of touch

with things entirely. He had no radio. Therefore, as far as he was

concerned, there might have been a crash of the stockmarket or another

Pearl Harbor; something like that would account for so few fishermen going

by. At any rate, there was very little chance apparently that anyone would

come to help him. He would have to work his own way out.

Yet even that prospect did not alarm him. At worst, he considered, he would

lie up in his cabin, with plenty of food and water for two or three days,

until the swelling in his hand subsided and he could drive his car down to

Johnson's, the first ranch.

The afternoon wore on. He did not feel like eating anything when it came

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toward supper-time, but he made himself a pot of coffee on the gasoline

stove, and drank several cups. He was in much pain, but in spite of the

pain and in spite of the coffee he became sleepy...

He woke suddenly in half-light, and realized that someone had pushed open

the cabin door. He felt a sudden relief to know that he had help. Two men

in city clothes were standing there, very decent-looking men, although

staring around strangely, as if in fright. "I'm sick!" he said from his

bunk, and suddenly he saw the fright on their faces change to sheer panic.

They turned suddenly without even shutting the door, and ran. A moment

later came the sound of a starting motor. It faded out as the car went up

the road.

Appalled now for the first time, he raised himself from the bank, and

looked through the window. The car had already vanished around the curve.

He could not understand. Why had they suddenly disappeared in panic,

without even offering to help?

He got up. The light was in the east; so he had slept until dawn the next

morning. His right hand was swollen and acutely painful. Otherwise he did

not feel very ill. He warmed lap the pot of coffee, made himself some

oatmeal, and lay down in- his bunk again, in the hope that after a while he

would feel well enough to risk driving down to Johnson's that is, of

course, if no one came along in the meantime who would stop and help him

and not like those others, who must be crazy, run away at the sight of a

sick man.

Soon, however, he felt much worse, and realized that he must be suffering

some kind of relapse. By the middle of the afternoon he was redly

frightened. Lying in his bunk, he composed a note, thinking that he should

leave a record of what had happened. It, would not be very long of course

before someone would find him; his parents would certainly telephone

Johnson's in a few days now, if they did not hear anything. Scrawling with

his left hand, he managed to get the words onto paper. He signed merely

Ish. It was too much work to write out his full name of Isherwood Williams,

and everybody knew him by his nickname. .

At noon, feeling himself like the ship-wrecked mariner who from his raft

sees the steamer cross along the horizon, he heard the sound of cars, two

of them, coming up the steep road. They approached, and then went on,

without stopping. He called to them, but by now he was weak, and his voice,

he was sure, did not carry the hundred yards to the turn-off where the cars

were passing.

Even so, before dusk he struggled to his feet, and lighted the kerosene

lamp. He did not want to be left in the dark.

Apprehensively, he bent his lanky body down to peer into the little mirror,

set too low for him because of the sloping roof of the cabin. His long face

was thin always, and scarcely seemed thinner now, but a reddish flush

showed through the sun-tan of his cheeks. His big blue eyes were

blood-shot, and stared back at him wildly with the glare of fever. His

light brown hair, unruly always, now stuck out in all directions,

completing the mirror-portrait of a very sick young man.

He got back into his bunk, feeling no great sense of fear although now he

more than half expected that he was dying. Soon a violent chill struck him;

from that he passed into a fever. The lamp burned steadily on the table,

and he could see around the cabin. The hammer which he had dropped on the

floor still stood there, handle pointed stiffly upwards, precariously

balanced. Being right before his eyes, the hammer occupied an unduly large

part of his consciousness-he thought about it a little disorderedly, as if

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he were making his will, an old-fashioned will in which he described the

chattels he was leaving. "One hammer, called a *single-jack,* weight of

head four pounds, handle one foot long, slightly cracked, injured by

exposure to weather, head of hammer somewhat rusted, still serviceable." He

had been extraordinarily pleased when he had found the hammer, appreciating

that actual link with the past. It had been used by some miner in the old

days when rock-drills were driven home in a low tunnel with a man swinging

a hammer in one hand; four pounds was about the weight a man could handle

in that way, and it was called a single-jack because it was managed

one-handedly. He thought, feverishly, that he might even include a picture

of the hammer as an illustration in his thesis.

Most of those hours of darkness he passed in little better than a

nightmare, racked by coughing, choking frequently, shaking with the chill

and then burning with the fever. A pink measles-like rash broke out on him.

At daybreak he felt himself again sinking into a deep sleep.

*"It has never happened!" cannot be construed to mean, "It can never

happen!"--as well say, "Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is

unbreakable," or "Because I've never died, I am immortal." One thinks first

of some great plague of insects-locusts or grasshoppers-when the species

suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as dramatically

sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The higher animals

also fluctuate. The lernmings work upon their cycle. The snowshoe-rabbits

build up through a period of years until they reach a climax when they seem

to be everywhere; then with dramatic suddenness their pestilence falls upon

them. Some zoologists have even suggested a biological law: that the number

of individuals in a species never remains constant, but always rises and

falls-the higher the animal and the slower its breeding-rate, the longer

its period of fluctuation.*

*During most of the nineteenth century the African buffalo was a common

creature on the veldt. It was a powerful beast with few natural enemies,

and if its census could have been taken by decades, it would have proved to

be increasing steadily. Then toward the century's end it reached its

climax, and was suddenly struck by a plague of rinderpest. Afterwards the

buffalo was almost a curiosity, extinct in many parts of its range. In the

last fifty years it has again slowly built up its numbers. *

*As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run

escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of

flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten

thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars,

pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and

more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an

uninterrupted run of sevens. *

When he awoke in the middle of the morning, he felt a sudden sense of

pleasure. He had feared he would be sicker than ever, but he felt much

better. He was not choking any more, and also his hand felt cooler. The

swelling had gone down. On the preceding day he had felt so bad, from

whatever other trouble had struck him, that he had had no time to think

about the hand. Now both the hand and the illness seemed better, as if the

one had stopped the other and they had both receded. By noon he was feeling

clear-headed and not even particularly weak.

He ate some lunch, and decided that he could make it down to Johnson's. He

did not bother to pack up everything. He took his precious notebooks and

his camera. At the last moment also, as if by some kind of compulsion, he

picked up the hammer, carried it to the car, and threw it in on the floor

by his feet. He drove off slowly, using his right hand as little as

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George A. Stewart - Earth Abides

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